In the course of expanding and fixing the D3D11 framework from my previous journal entry, I've found that there are types and functions that I want to have as public in the library but not exposed outside of it (internal scope in C#). Instead of purely using the pimpl idiom (for those unfamiliar with the term or how to apply it, these should help explain it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opaque_pointer and https://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/general-programming/the-c-pimpl-r1794), I decided on public and private headers, for which pimpl can be used to hide types. To automatically generate the public headers, I created a utility program that uses tokens in the private headers to generate the public ones (to be clear, the utility doesn't automatically do pimpl, that's up to the developer, the utility just does simple line exclusion). I did a few quick searches and didn't see a utility that already did this for C++, but it was simple enough to program my own.

There were a few choices for how to specify the start/stop tokens: comments, ifdef, ifndef. So that IDE outlining can show the affected sections and so the build of the library doesn't need an additional define (this is pure laziness since adding a define to the project settings is trivial), I went with lines starting with "#ifndef" and "#endif" which also contain "PUBLIC_HEADER" to mark the start/end of sections to exclude from the public header. The lines need to start with the "#ifndef" or "#endif" tokens so that if needed the line can be commented out rather than needing to delete it and remember where they need to go if/when they need to be added back in. I've tested it successfully so far for hiding types (via pimpl's declare and only use pointers approach) and functions. For an example usage:#ifndef FOO_H#define FOO_Hclass Foo{ public: // stuff... #ifndef PUBLIC_HEADER // this function is excluded from the public header void blah();#endif /* PUBLIC_HEADER */ // stuff... private: // stuff...};#endif /* FOO_H */



For integrating it into the library build, I added a post-build event to make the public include directory and call the utility. That has the side effect of the test program in the solution can't check its code against the library headers until the library build is complete and if an error is found during the test program build, clicking the error message opens the public include instead of the private one in the solution. I consider this okay since it is not the normal use case. The normal use case is having a separate solution to which a released build of the library is added to "additional dependencies", and the path to the public headers is added to the "additional include directories" project settings.

An alternative to generating public headers is to use the same headers for public and private, and switch to using an ifdef for when building the library. I didn't go this way primarially due to one issue: if a program build sets that define, all the library private stuff is available to the program

Source (under MIT license as normal):